I'm having a lot of fun with IconDeveloper. It's almost done. Probably will go 1.0 in the next couple of days. It's one of the dozen or so programs that makes up Object Desktop, a suite of programs that let you completely change the way Windows looks and functions (as little or as much as you want).

I've used various icon editing packages over the years. My big beef with them has always been that they are 1) expensive and 2) come with image editing features.  I don't want to use some little program's bitmap editor. I'm going to use Corel Draw or Photoshop to do that.

What I want, as a user, is to be able to turn stuff into icons easily.

For me, what it comes down to are a handful of features that make IconDeveloper so fun.  For one thing, I can go to my graphics, put it in thumbnail and then right click on them and turn them into icons. Pow. Icon created in all the most common formats (32x32, 48x48, 72x72, etc.).

That's what I want.  I want to be able to just press a button and have my pictures or whatever turn into icons, ready to use. Which leads me to another killer cool feature IMO, being able to copy to the clipboard something and turn that right into an icon too.

So if I'm on some web page, I can right click on a picture, copy it, and then in IconDeveloper turn it into an icon. Now maybe I'm out of touch. Maybe people really like to spend $40 on an icon editor that comes with its own photoshop type features. But I'd rather not. I have programs to create graphics that no icon editor is going to be able to touch. And IconDeveloper lets me do things like mess with the color and such if I want.

Now, for people really into icons, it has stuff like being able to batch convert. I did make use of this earlier today. I downloaded a bunch of ObjectDock PNG images and put them all in a single directory. Then I just told IconDeveloper to turn them all into icons and voila. I was all set.

I haven't had this much fun with icons since the OS/2 days (OS/2 came with icon creation built in).